Pelosi's Anti-Merit Metaphor for Governance
By Jerry Kammer on May 20, 2019
In mid-1986, when then-Representative Charles Schumer was brokering the immigration reform bill that would be enacted later that year, he described the challenge of forging a compromise across the perilous immigration divide as “a metaphor for governance.†In other words, he saw it as a test of the capacity of Congress to manage one of the most fraught and complex areas of public policy.
Last week, when House Speaker Nancy Pelosi rejected as “condescending†President Trump’s proposal for a more merit-based immigration policy, she provided a metaphor not just for the shattered condition of Washington’s governance of immigration, but also for the Democratic Party’s ideologically rigid disavowal of all principles of immigration constraint.
Unless the moderate Democrats who form the majority of the party’s membership assert themselves over the open-borders Democrats who dominate the party’s activist base, they will be complicit in a blunder that could well lead to the reelection of Donald Trump. Many Americans will prefer Trump’s chest-thumpingly excessive efforts to limit immigration over Nancy Pelosi’s what-me-worry? indifference to the crisis now unfolding on the Mexican border. However disjointed and border-wall-obsessed Trump’s policies may be, he will at least be able to make a case to voters that he has tried to constrain the chaos.
https://cis.org/Kammer/Pelosis-AntiMerit-Metaphor-Governance
